This chapter from Effective Time Management: Using Microsoft Outlook to Organize Your Work and Personal Life gives you tips on how to quickly and effectively prepare meetings with Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint, and exchange data and documents for review as a team to save you and your colleagues precious time and achieve better results.

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL

Send meeting requests with Outlook.

Use the calendar overlay.

Optimize your calendar.

Prepare meetings more effectively.

“A Total Chaos Squad!”

IF YOU frequently need to plan meetings with colleagues whose schedules are very full and who are hard to reach, the Scheduling Assistant in Microsoft Outlook can be a big help. However, if you are too rash, Outlook meeting requests can become a curse rather than a blessing. This chapter gives you tips on how to quickly and effectively prepare meetings with Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint, and exchange data and documents for review as a team—to save you and your colleagues precious time and achieve better results.

How much time and money do you waste in unnecessary, badly prepared, or ill-structured meetings? Just add up hourly rates and loss of productivity for time spent getting very little done. Do you frequently look for information, but can’t reach the colleague who could supply it, which means that you have to wait hours or until the next day?

ROBIN AND THE FANTASTIC FIVE

Today Robin Wood made it to the meeting room right on time at 9:00 A.M. He’s totally out of breath and hasn’t had any breakfast, but that’s okay, because his assistant Melissa always makes sure there’s fresh coffee and tasty cookies. Except for Melissa, Robin, and Robin’s manager Charlie, nobody else has arrived yet. So he has some time to eat something and catch his breath. Charlie leaves at 9:04 to take care of some things before the others will arrive. At 9:08 Justin shows up. At 9:17 Boris Scholl from the board of directors arrives. At 9:21 Charlie returns and the meeting starts—but without Robin’s colleague, Holly, who arrives at 9:30 sharp, looking rather puzzled: She’s almost always on time, but this meeting had been moved so many times that she had forgotten to note the latest change from 9:30 to 9:00 in her calendar.

After a bit of back and forth, everyone finally agrees to an agenda. All participants skim through the documents they need to read as a basis for discussion for this meeting. Then Justin reads a few questions and their possible answers, so all delegates can raise their hands for their favorite option. Before counting the votes for each question, each person gets two minutes to think about which option he or she will vote for. The meeting finally really gets going at 10:12, but at 10:30 Boris Scholl needs to leave for his next appointment, and at 10:50 Robin needs to run to catch his flight, even though not all agenda items have been addressed.

Two hours later, Robin has landed punctually. He is happy to realize that after lunch he still has 45 minutes left before his appointment, and the 3G network coverage is great. This gives him a chance to take care of a few email messages and phone calls. His colleague, Holly, had sent him an email message before the meeting, with an urgent request for him to call one of her customers—unfortunately, she didn’t include the phone number. The customer info is not saved in Robin’s contacts, so he quickly calls Holly. However, she is in the middle of a presentation and won’t be available until Robin is sitting in his own customer meeting, which will last until evening....

The Problem: Way Too Many Inconvenient Meeting Requests and Insufficient Preparation

Some of the most common problems in this area of cooperation have the following causes:

Too many meetings that take too long and leave too little time for other things.

Meeting requests that are scheduled at very inconvenient times because they are squeezed in too late, when all other times are already taken for the next few days.

It takes a lot of back and forth until you finally come up with a meeting date and time that works for everybody. Some people don’t keep their calendar up to date, and others just put in a fake appointment from 5:00 A.M. until 11:00 P.M. each day to block their calendar for any requests (but because they have to be at some of the meetings, they end up receiving requests for the most inappropriate times possible...).

Unclear meeting goals, or very different meeting expectations.

No preparation or inadequate preparation, and lots of aimless chatter without a time limit.

Too many participants, some of whom the topic doesn’t concern and who therefore have nothing to contribute and only waste their time by being there.

Missing, obsolete, overly comprehensive, or unread documents.

No access to data required by everyone in the team, such as the contacts maintained by another colleague.